To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Antin’s “Notes for an Ultimate Prosody” Revisited

[note,
for the record. Originally published in George Quasha’s magazine Stony Brook (number one, December 1968),
Antin’s essay on prosody was accompanied by the following note from the editor:
“Mr. Antin wrote these Notes as a paper, originally, which was not amended for
publication. I persuaded him to publish it, though he is not happy with the
presentation, because I believe it raises crucial questions. It is coherent if
not thorough, and it may succeed in bringing about some relevant discussion,
hopefully in future issues of STONY BROOK. Part Two of the Notes will begin to
investigate the poetics of that area inhabited by himself, Rothenberg, MacLow,
Cage, Duncan, etc.”

There was no followup, however, nor is it
certain that one was intended. The
essay, never republished in a print edition, is a clear indication of Antin’s
ongoing thoughtfulness in these matters. It was posted in two segments on the blogger
version of Poems and Poetics in 2009
and is here carried forward to Jacket2.
(J.R.)]

1/

The Contribution of Meter to the Sound Structure of Poetry is and has
been Trivial

Most discussions of prosody begin
and end with metrics, but the contribution of meter to the sound structure of
all poetry that was neither sung nor intended for musical

accompaniment, when it has been at
all specific, has been trivial. Yet because most writers on prosody would
probably dispute this, and since some recent poets have worked out sound
structures on the basis of implicit defects in metrical theory, it's probably
worth taking a look at the metrical background.

Almost all writers on metrics
agree that meter is a compositional constraint. In this theory a particular
meter is a pattern of distribution of some phonological feature over stretches
of language. A particularly simple
example is iso-syllabic verse. The pattern prescribes that for each
language stretch called "the line" there must be an equal number of
syllables. The syllable is a phonological feature of most European languages. Even in English, where
it is not always possible to determine syllable boundaries, it is usually
possible to agree about the number of syllables in an utterance. But "the
line" is another matter and has no linguistic existence. It is therefore a
matter of metrical convenience where the line is broken. If there were no
additional constraints preventing the poet from ending lines in the middle of
words or from ending or beginning poems in the middle of lines, the only constraint
on the poet would be the requirement that he either count while composing his
poem or afterward when arranging it on paper; and the
preceding sentence would class as a kind of didactic isosyllabic verse.

it is therefore

a matter of

metrical con

venience where the

line is broken

This little poem is extra-formal
in that the total number of syllables is an integral multiple of the
permissible number of syllables per line. While this is a clear-cut example of
a compositional constraint (at least insofar as setting down the poem on
paper), it is not at all evident how such a constraint enters into the sound
structure of the poem. For this to occur there must be some manner of marking
off line endings in an unequivocal fashion, say by rhyme, or sounding an
instrument, or by some theory of recitation, however arbitrary, by which the
line endings could be made audible. Even this would not ensure the
perceivability of the number of syllables per line, though it would establish
unequivocal line endings. A fairly large number of syllables per line would make it virtually impossible
to listen to the words and count the syllables at the same time. Naturally it
is possible, when there is a written text, to inspect the line endings and then read the poem
with the conviction that one is "hearing" the syllable count. This is
something like a music student at the opera, reading a score of Tristan and
using the orchestra as an auditory aid. It may be enjoyable but it is not
listening to Tristan. Now I am perfectly aware of the visual and conceptual
fascination of printed texts, musical scores and architectural plans. That is
the way of concrete poetry. But printed lines are no more verbal
poems than drawn lines are architecture. Up till fairly recently the printed text
has primarily been a notation for some language utterance, which must be
audible. In his history of German prosody Andreas Heusler mentions a poem of
Rueckert's which was composed entirely without the phoneme /r/. Is it
reasonable to suppose that this constraint enters into the sound structure of
the poem?

It may be suggested that this is
an unreasonable analogy, that English poetry, for example, is typically written
in syllable-stress meters and that syllable-stress is distinctly perceivable in English,
but that "our ear is not accustomed to estimate line lengths simply by the
number of syllables." This is quite true but not especially relevant,
since the ear is not accustomed to estimate line lengths by counting anything
at all. It is no more a part of normal linguistic behavior to count syllable
stresses than to count syllables. In fact counting is simply not a normal part
of linguistic perception.

Moreover English "syllable
stress" meter is complicated still further by the circumstance that no one
can be quite certain what phonological feature is distributed, whether it is a
single phonological feature, or whether it is a phonological feature at all.
For a more or less thorough discussion of this problem it is worth looking at
Seymour Chatman's A Theory of Meter.
The metrical theory he advances is not convincing, but his review of the
phonological problems is fairly up to date.
Briefly, the main difficulty in identifying the metrical ictus of
English poetry with English stress is that it is now by no means certain how we
are to identify English stress. Traditionally linguists and grammarians agreed
that there was a feature of emphasis marking either prominent syllables or their syllabic vowels. Formerly
this emphasis in the Germanic languages was believed to consist of increased
intensity of articulation resulting in increased loudness or acoustical intensity. Experimental phonetics
has indicated that increased loudness is by no means the most significant
factor in the perception of this emphasis. Most work in speech

synthesis has suggested that the
main factor in perceiving stress is increased duration of the syllabic vowel,
and that vowel quality and pitch deflection are also of considerable

importance. These results do not
lend support to the acoustical intensity theory of stress, but it is quite
possible, nevertheless, that syllable duration, vowel quality and pitch
deflection are simply cues to recognition of the increased articulatory force
required to produce the emphasized syllables. Moreover it now begins to appear
that stress within word boundaries -- lexical stress, may have to be distinguished
from phrasal accent, the relative prominence of a syllable in phrasal grouping.
The most convincing descriptions, which are still no more than tentative,
suggest that phrasal accent.results from the interaction of lexical stress
rules with rules for pitch contours.

The most recent work pointing in this
direction is Chomsky's The Sound Pattern
of English. But the earlier work of Kenneth Pike and Dwight Bolinger also
tends in this direction. In any event we are no longer confronted with the
single syllabic emphasis of lexical stress or even with the
marvelously complex but symmetrical theory of four independent stress phonemes
and four equally independent pitch phonemes hypothesized by Trager and Smith
back in 1951. Since the problem of assigning ictus in English syllable stress
meters is the problem of comparing immediately adjacent syllables for relative
prominence regardless of word boundaries, phrase boundaries, or even discourse
boundaries, it is more reasonable to assume that any available sign of relative
prominence will be used. What is in fact distributed is then "syllable prominence," which may result from a variety of phonological, syntactic
and discourse factors. This is apparent if one merely looks at the standard
account of the conventions for distributing metrical accent in typical English
meters. One degree of accent is recognized, so that there are only accented and
unaccented syllables; and the accent is determined by comparing
immediately adjacent syllables in a left to right direction in sets of two or
three (according to whether the meter is duple or triple) for relative prominence. The process of
comparison is abruptly terminated when the "line ending" is reached.
Generally it is quite possible to reach agreement in comparing syllables, but
there are certain cases in which the comparisons are, to say the least,
difficult and others in which they are probably nonsensical. Within a word it
is always possible to determine which of two adiacent syllables is
more prominent. In a phrase group, given an understanding of the domain of the
speaker's emphasis, it is also often possible to agree more or less
unequivocally. But when the comparisons of relative prominence have to cross
phrase juncture or sentence juncture boundaries, it is frequently impossible to
reach any meaningful decision. In a phrase like " . . . in chase of him .
. . " when the central accent falls on "chase" and the pitch
contour begins to fall from "chase" and falls smoothly to
"him," where the fall in pitch is abruptly cut for what Trager and
Smith used to call "single bar juncture," who can say with certainty
whether "of" or "him" is more prominent? Or in the sequence
"He left me: I called after him." who can with any assurance assign
relative prominence by comparing "me" and "I". That there
is a convention that legalizes such successions of two unaccented syllables ~ the
pyrrhic foot) or in some cases two accented syllables (the spondee) is not the
point. The introduction of successions of this sort makes it impossible to rely
on the number of prominent syllables to determine the location of the line
ending or to count the feet by adding up the number of accents. It is usual to
refer to these substitutions as occasional variations on a well established
pattern, but they are not occasional and what metric pattern is established in
a passage like the following, from which they come?

…quickening then the pace (line 131)

of the unwieldy
creature he bestrode,

He left me: I called
after him aloud;

He heeded not; but
with his twofold charge

Still in his grasp,
before me, full in view, (line 135)

Went hurrying o'er the
illimitable waste,

With the fleet waters
of a drowning world

In chase of him;
whereat I waked in terror,

And saw the sea before
me, and the book

In which I had been
reading, at my side. (line 140)

I doubt that anyone will deny the
brilliance of the checked music of this passage from the Fifth Book of The Prelude, but it is hardly a metrical
pattern that determines the musical effects. In order to scan these lines as
"blank verse" we must assume at least two pyrrhic feet in line 132,
two more in line 133, an inverted (trochaic) foot in 134, another one in 135,
two more pyrrhics and one anapest in line 136, two more pyrrhics in 137 plus a
possible spondee, a probable pyrrhic in 138 and an additional unaccented
syllable at the end of the line, a pyrrhic in 139, and two or (conceivably)
three pyrrhics in line 140. Add to this that while 7 of the lines have some
clear junctural breaks at the line endings, there are at least 7 junctural
breaks within the lines, so that the caesura, which is the basis of the sound
of the passage, cannot be used as a clue to the line ending. For the sake of clarity, this is my
conjectural scansion of the passage:

… quíck ên/îng thén /thê páce (line 131)

ôf thê/ûnwiél/dy créa/tûre hê/bêstróde,/

Hê léft/ mê: Í/ câlled áf/ têr hîm/â lóud/

Hê héed/ êd nót,/ bút
wîth/ hîs twó/fôld chárge/

Stíll în/ hîs grásp,/
bêfóre/ mê, fúll/ în víew,/ (line 135)

Wênt húrr/ yîng óer/ thê îl
lî / mî tâ/ blê wáste,/

Wîth thê/ fléet wá/
têrs ôf/ â drówn/ îng wórld/

În cháse/ ôf hím;/ whêreát/Í wáked/ în térrôr/

Ând sáw/ thê séa/
bêfóre/ mê, ând/ thê bóok

În whích/ Î hád/
bêen réa / dîng, át / mˆy síde./ (line 140)

But this seems like a foolish
exercise, since it could not be resolved by any ear. It hardly seems likely
that the lines were composed with the metrical restraints in mind. The poet like the centipede would have too
many options for the "metric" to provide him with an unequivocal way
of going on. Nor is the passage atypical.

2/

"Metrical irregularity"
is more normal than exceptional throughout the history of blank verse.
Shakespeare provides as good examples as Wordsworth because there is no neat
single convention of syllable - stress meter in English. The reason for the
very complicated set of options available to poets writing in these meters is
that from the start there were two conflicting conventions, one of which was an
iso-syllabic convention adapted from Romance practice and the other a
quantitative convention adapted to English with the substitution of accent for
quantity. This conflict is apparent in the first essay on prosody in the
English language ~George Gascoigne's Certain
Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rime in English. It
is clear that Gascoigne regards the number of syllables as the measure of the
verse: "I say, then, remember to hold the same measure wherewith you
begin, whether it be in a verse of six syllables, eight, ten, twelve,
etc." At the same time he defends Chaucer's "failure" to observe
the syllable count on the grounds that Chaucer's lines are isochronic:
"Also our father Chaucer hath used the same liberty in feet and measures
that the Latinists do use, whosoever do peruse and well consider his works he
shall find that, although his lines are not always of the selfsame number of
syllables, yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse
and that which hath most syllables in it will fall to the ear correspondent
unto that which hath fewest syllables in it; and like wise that which hath
fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such a
natural sound as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more
syllables of lighter accents."

The earliest English blank verse
was, of course, strictly decasyllabic, as was Gascoigne's own The Steel Glass. But with the adaptation
of blank verse to the theater there was no possible significance in the purely
page oriented, strict syllabics and the poets on grounds of expedience
abandoned it and presumably justified the expedience on grounds of a "Classical"
practice in which the "long" and "short" syllables of Greek
and Latin were identified with the "accented" and
"unaccented" syllables of English, Even Milton, whose blank verse in Paradise Lost is clearly decasyllabic,
has lines which can only be resolved by some accent-counting convention.[1] The
historical situation resulted in a situation of an illusory blank verse metric;
whenever one convention acted as a compositional constraint the other
convention provided the loophole. The situation with rhymed verse was
essentially the same, except that rhyme is audible and the use of terminal rhyme
made the line endings distinctly perceivable. This did not establish "the
meter," but it did mark off the stretches of language separated by rhyme
as equivalence units regardless of how they may have been varied in duration,
accentual weight and so on. Consequently rhyme, as far as the sound structure
was concerned, was of far greater importance than meter in the history of
English syllable-stress poetry.

If we extend the meaning of rhyme
to cover alliteration, it has been of far greater importance than meter
throughout the entire history of English poetry.[2] The effect of meter seems to be either visual
or moral. Either it is a page image of regularity and pattern, something like
capital letters at the beginning of verse lines, or else an imaginary sense of
constraint that has allowed certain poets to sleep at night. Given its largely
fictitious existence one might wonder why poets felt any need to liberate
themselves from it. Why free verse? The reason is more or less obvious. The
image of meter invariably refers to other poetry. It is a visual framing effect
and places whatever language is set within the frame in a context of
"literature." It is not a musical device, it's a sentiment.
"Metrical poetry" normally comes in a bundle together with
syntactical and lexical habits that are much more effective in establishing the
presence of the past, but this is not necessary. Whitman is able to embed the
sound of a full-blown "folk song" in the free verse of Lilacs without
the appearance of metric:

O how shall I warble myself for
the dead one there I loved?

And how shall I deck my song for
the large sweet soul that has gone?

And what shall my perfume be for
the grave of him I love?

Sea winds blown from east and
west,

Blown from the Eastern sea and
blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,

These and with these and the
breath of my chant,

I'll perfume the grave of him I
love.

O what shall I hang on the chamber
walls?

And what shall the pictures be
that I hang on the walls

To adorn the burial house of him I
love?

And it's possible, like Auden, to
come on as Noel Coward till somebody counts the long and short of the syllables
and decides "My God, it's in minor Alcaics!" Which is terribly chic. And poetry that is not at
all scannable may still appear metrical if it is sufficiently conventional in
its attitudes. Thus Yvor Winters decided that "Gerontion" was written
in "Websterian blank verse." This isn't incorrect, it's nonsense.
Neither Eliot nor Webster are scannable in any reasonable way, and to say that
in Websterian blank verse "the blank verse norm is feeble" is such a
grotesque understatement it sounds like a joke. Anyone who scans
"Gerontion's" seventy-some lines and finds a handful scannable -- by
applying conflicting analyses of the hypothetical pattern -- is not entitled to
write "in defense of reason." All that Winters meant to say was that
"Gerontion" sounds like Webster, which is neither accurate nor a
prosodic statement. Anyone with a perverse sense of humor or a morbid interest
in literary criticism can compare Winters' attack on Eliot in In Defense Of Reason with Harvey Gross's
defense in Sound and Form in Modern
Poetry. What emerges is the conclusion that the briefest suggestion of
scannability is a gravitational center around which prosodists cluster like moths
around a light. Eliot is, however, partly responsible for this sort of
discussion. It is the kind of inanity he made possible by his 1917 essay on
free verse: " . . . the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the
arras in even the freest verse." When Polonius is summoned he always
appears.

NOTES

1. The idea of a blind man
composing poems in a purely page oriented syllabic measure is so unlikely that
alternatives ought to be suggested. Either Milton’s blindness was mythical,
which doesn’t seem likely, or he was not responsible for the final page
arrangement of the poem he dictated, in which case the metric of Paradise Lost
was largely due to the editors. This may
explain why the irregular lines were never corrected.

2. I am aware that there are a
number of very elaborate and ingenious theories of old English versification.
but the only one that can count as reasonably "metrical" requires the
hypothesis of either musical accompaniment or some special recitation technique
which would allow for isochrony, and the evidence for this is slight. The more
commonly accepted Five Type Foot Theory worked out by Sievers and subsequently
rejected by him may describe fairly accurately the phrasal rhythms of Beowulf,
but it is hard to see what that has to do with metrics. As a compositional
constraint the theory supposes an immense variety of options. There are really
six types of "foot" and numerous loopholes that constitute
subspecies. It is not really clear what is excluded by this theory and, if
significant Old English phrasal rhythms are excluded by it, and whether this is
due to the rhetorical habits of the Beowulf poet or Old English poetry in
general. (It is worth pointing out that an observer of chess games might wait a
very long time before ever seeing White open by moving his king pawn to king
three; it is nevertheless quite legal. Moreover the Sievers theory depends upon
the existence of "lines," and there are no lines in Beowulf that were
not established by editors. And the lines established by the editors are not
satisfactory and require the assumption of numerous "hypermetric
lines," which then require still more explanation. It would seem much more
economical to assume that there is no "metric" and there are no
"lines," that there is a continuum of language punctuated by
alliteration, a habit of bipartite phrasing, and perhaps a consistency in
placement of the caesura. If we accept the oral formulaic theory of composition
for Beowulf there is even less reason to suppose a metric, especially a metric
so laughably complicated as Sievers'. It seems extremely unlikely that the
theory of Old English meter is based on anything more solid than nineteenth-century
expectations.

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]